1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to a technical field of managing, storing, processing, inputting and outputting the medical care information, and more particularly to a technical field of a new system for aiding or directing a person related to medical care such as a medical doctor, a nurse, a pharmacist, a medical office worker, a patient and so on, to make up a better medical care schedule and record.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, each medical doctor, nurse, etc. makes up the medical care schedule as for medical care actions such as a test, an examination, an inspection, a reservation for hospitalizing, an operation, a medication and so on, by thinking and summarizing it in his or her mind on the basis of his or her experience and sense. Therefore, a better medical care schedule can be made up by a well trained medical doctor etc., who carefully considers the needed care.
On the other hand, as a system for processing medical information by use of a computer, there is a computer system for medical office work, to which data indicating types of medical examination, medication, medical insurance etc. are inputted and which speedily calculates the medical care out of those inputted data and outputs a bill. Under the development of the computer communication technique nowadays, an order system is also proposed which quickly transmits the computer readable information in place of a paper chit on which the message is written, from one terminal device at one department to the other terminal device at the other department so as to speed up the preparation of the medicine, the account and the like. Further it has been tried to communicate medical information by use of a personal computer communication such as the internet, the nifty and the like.
Since the medical care schedule is related to a human life and thus very important, it is desirable to standardize the medical care schedule to some extent and keep its quality high, regardless of the discretion or skill of the individual doctor.
However, first of all, the aforementioned medical care schedule, which is made up by each doctor, nurse, etc., needs a means to summarize it to each user in such a way as "the prescription will be performed on X day, the test will be performed on Y day, . . . " for example, which basically cannot function as a schedule table related to the medical care actions or processes. And, above all, this kind of conventional medical care schedule depends very much upon the individual discretion and skill of each doctor, nurse, etc., so that it is almost impossible to schedule and program the medical care processes which are the objectively best in case of serving various medical care actions and processes with respect to numbers of patients who have various kinds of chronic and disease. As a result, there is a serious problem that a less effective medical treatment may be applied by an erroneous judgment of the doctor, the nurse, the pharmacist or the like, and that the condition or disease, which would have been cured by applying the most suitable treatment, is not finally cured. Furthermore, depending upon the type of medical care actions, the medical care schedule may include information, which should be referred to by all of the staff related to the medical care such as the doctor, the nurse, the pharmacist, the medical engineer, the patient himself, the family of the patient, etc., or may include the information which should not be referred to by persons other than the very limited staff. On the other hand, it may be that only limited staff are allowed to make up the schedule, such as only a doctor, only a specialized doctor, only a nurse, only a reservation staff and so on. Accordingly, it requires great effort to make up the medical care schedule, refer to it and change or modify it without any trouble.
On the other hand, the quality itself of the medical care can be hardly improved by the aforementioned computer system for the medical office work and the order system, although the burden on the office works and the waiting time of the patients can be reduced by those systems. Further, according to the aforementioned communication technique for the medical information by use of the personal computer communication, it is still at the stage of transmitting and receiving the computer readable information which content is substantially the same as that of the information written on the paper, and the improvement thereof lies mostly on the high communication speed. Thus, this communication technique works for improving the quality of the medical care in a sense that a doctor may be informed very quickly by chance of a specific medical care method from another doctor who is the personal computer communication colleague. But this communication technique is hardly reliable or useful for scheduling an appropriate, stable and subjective medical treatment processes.